Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with conversations

How can I converse in large groups?

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:32:01 -0800

Help me carry on conversations in groups with my *special snowflake* situation. Yes, I know this question has been asked before, but my case is different.

I am an 18 year old female college student. I am a shy introvert, who is a mix of INTJ/ INTP. I have always had trouble carrying conversations in large groups (say more than 4 people). I think one problem I have is timing. I can't seem to get a word in edge wise. I don't want to be *that girl* and force my point in where it doesn't flow. When I do get a comment in, other, more forceful people seem to move the conversation elsewhere, and thus people rarely respond to my comments.

If it matters, the groups are usually 100% female. They seem like nice people, and I would like to get to know them better.

Compounding factors: I have learning disabilities (but not Aspergers) that make it hard to read people and sense timing. My parents were very strict when I was growing up, so I was not allowed to watch tv, watch very many movies, or listen to popular music. I still do not really enjoy these things today so I have very little "popular culture" currency. I am commonly lost in the conversation, because I am not familiar with the particular show or band. It would be hard to even research these topics, because they change every conversation. Further research cannot mitigate 18 years of lack of popular culture.

Potential things in my favor: I am self aware. I have a roommate, an INTJ, who can help me to a point.

The other questions I have seen before seem to be about grown up mingling. Here, this is not about approaching the group. Nor does finding fellow wall flowers apply to this situation, because everybody else is actively participating in the one conversation. I would find it strange to ask questions about topic to the group (to try to understand the topic), because it would disrupt the main conversation.

In short, I'm looking for advice to improve my conversation skills keeping in mind my *special snowflake* situation. I am still working on meeting new people with different interests, but that's hard when I can't converse with people in larger groups. I will reiterate that I do not have Aspergers. I'm just awkward and shy around people.

How to have a coherent group email conversation?

flummox — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:29:44 -0800

Recomendations needed for a good way to keep group email communications clear and unmuddled, you know emails zooming back and forth, people messing up addresses, cross talking etc. If you were about to embark on a email conversation with five people with much back and forth, one fraught with high emotions and perhaps family type dynamics, how would you make this work? Would you set agreed upon ground rules and/or would you use a tech solution. Is there a excellent ( hopefully free) software solution to this problem?

And... uh... what's your name again?

forza — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:49:57 -0800

What kinds of generic questions are good to use in social situations (groups, parties, etc) when there are awkward silences? I don't exactly have stellar social skills -- I mean, they're not hideous or anything, but I do way better at one-on-one interactions with close friends than anything else. Yet life seems to keep throwing me in situations in which I must talk socially with people, and I feel like I could improve my skills in this area.

One thing I have noticed that I do badly happens when there are awkward silences. I become uncomfortable and babble. Very often I will leap in with some funny / self-deprecating story, which often works, but fails if you do it too much - and I don't like feeling like I'm talking about myself too much. Or I will "mock" insult other people (targeted to people who I know won't be bothered), but again, this only really works in small doses, and only if such people are around.

The advice often given on MetaFilter in this situation is to ask questions to other people and get them talking, but this is where I fail miserably. What questions?!? Very often these are people I sort of know, or it's in group situations, so "how many siblings do you have again?" type things are awkward and strange (or I already know the answer). I know nothing about fashion, so questions like "where did you buy that necklace/scarf/etc" die a painful death once they answer, because I don't know how to respond. I recently moved to Australia from the US so I don't understand most of the major sports, nor do I have a favourite team, so general sports-related questions don't work either. (I'm trying to cultivate an interest in at least one of them but this will take a while).

When I ask people in real life for advice most people say to ask about whatever I am truly interested in -- but the problem is that most of the time I am interested in things that aren't conducive to general social chit-chat: I'm an enormous geek so I will be thinking things like "I wonder how you could capture the social dynamics of this scenario with an agent-based system" or whatever. Unless you're in a very specialised crowd, these sorts of thoughts are not the kind of thing that leads to good questions (and I don't have as much problem when I'm with that sort of crowd).

I was hoping people could give me examples of generic questions that I could memorise and have to hand when in these situations. Non-intrusive, friendly, useful in a variety of contexts, and just aimed to be conversational filler and polite chit-chat. I know this may seem like a silly request, but pretend I am an alien from outer space and need everything spelled out in detail. Bonus points if you can kind of sketch out how to deal with the sort of answers these questions often get.

And just to clarify: I'm not asking for questions that work with people you have just met. I'm asking for questions appropriate for people you kinda-sorta know, and are friendly-ish with, but are not close friends nor probably will never be; e.g. at work-related social situations, or talking to a friend of a friend at the bar while the friend goes off to get drinks.

I want to build a web site where gamers can converse via video. Where do I begin?

raddevon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:16:08 -0800

I want to build a web site where gamers can converse via video. I'm thinking of something a bit like a Seesmic targeted toward gamers. Where do I start? I'm not a developer, but I can poke around in code a bit on my own. I wouldn't be opposed to using a roll-your-own-social-network solution and doing it all myself as a hobby. I also wouldn't be opposed to hiring a developer off elance and positioning this as a business. I don't really know where to start in either direction. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have experience with Wordpress and Drupal.

Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you.

the agents of KAOS — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:22:08 -0800

[How] Should I tell my parents, now I'm a healthy adult, about my longstanding depression? I have probably been depressed since I was a preteen. I mostly hid it, passed everything off as 'teenage moods', got sent to a counsellor after a half-hearted suicide attempt and got better at acting ok. I'm now 23, and I've been on medication for about a year, since being diagnosed by my GP with major depression, and I think I am doing well now. For the first time in years, I haven't been cutting or thinking about suicide, I feel happy. But I've never told anyone I know that I have been depressed, or am being treated for it. I have been out of home and independant (in another state) for about six years, and I'm pretty sure my parents have no idea - they were worried about me as a teen, but I think I seemed to grow out of it. (To clarify: they were good parents, I was just better at hiding everything).

I feel like they probably would want to know. I have arranged to have an operation while visiting them soon (so I can stay with them and be looked after while recuperating), and my mother was filling in admissions forms for me, and asked if I'm on any medication. I lied and said no. I think I should be able to tell them, but I hate the idea of making them feel like they did something wrong while I was a kid, or that they need to worry about me, especially as I am about to move away internationally for a new job.

Does anyone have experience with this from either side? How can I approach it? Would they really want to know? How about other people I know, friends and siblings and potential significant others? How likely is it that they've basically figured it out anyway, from noticing the decorative scars down my inner arms?

Landlord recording conversations

Anonymous — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:29:09 -0800

I just found out my landlord has been secretly taping our conversations. She uses a tape recorder hidden in her purse. The landlord is in the process of evicting another tenant of the building and has asked the court to bring in tapes of conversations as evidence. The judge gave her forms to fill out so she can get the tape recorder and tapes past security. I live in Illinois which is a two-party consent state. (both parties have to agree to be recorded and informed of the recording). I plan on showing up in court during my neighbors eviction hearing. If the landlord does play a tape of one of my conversations (she stated to the judge she has recorded evidence from "another tenant") what can I do about it? Do I go to the cops with a trial transcript ? Do I talk to a lawyer? Do I ask the judge to take the tapes into evidence?

Call Me: Anytime Anyplace Anywhere Anyway

Xurando — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:05:26 -0800

Novel Research Filter: Help me describe phone culture/ etiquette in the 70's prior to the advent of answering machines. I'm writing a story set in the 1970's. In the story the protagonist has to call the librarian at his law firm late at night regarding a research question. Would the law firm have had a paid answering service and would the service have passed on the message to the librarian late at night?

If the protagonist had called the librarian directly sometime after 10:30 PM, would a normal person in that era have picked up the call thinking it was important or just let it ring. Would she/he be angry to find the call was work related?

How would you describe in general the phone culture of the time in terms of how important messages were passed on by phone. Was there a cultural conditioning regarding what was important to share and what wasn't. I'm sure it wasn't like communication today, anything anytime. Now I see people talking on their cell phones in the airport at 5AM, on the east coast, and can't imagine such conversations happening in the 70's. Am I wrong about this?

Help, I'm trapped in a conversation and I can't get out

dersins — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:14:51 -0800

How do I end a conversation politely? Sometimes I find myself trapped in seemingly endless conversations which I am completely uninterested in continuing. Interlocutors can range from "Crazy Homeless Guy," to "Drunk Friendly Guy In Bar" to "Work Colleague Guy" to "Social Acquaintance Guy" to "Boring Relative Guy." Some of these, at least, are people to whom I don't want to be an asshole, or whom I don't want to offend. What are some good ways to end such a conversation with a maximum of efficiency but (and this is important) a minimum of dickishness?

Individual custom feeds?

jsbww — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 07:26:35 -0800

I'm starting a new blog on a wide-ranging and ever-shifting set of topics, and I want to let my readers choose which of those topics to follow via RSS. I could offer tons of separate feeds, but many of these would be ephemeral, so I'd want to make it really easy to unsubscribe. Ideally, each user would get a single custom feed, the content of which they could control from my site (see here and here). Is there any way of doing this? I've considered the following solutions, but they're all pretty kludgy, and I was hoping someone here might suggest something more elegant.

* Email listserves offer convenient "unsubscribe" links under every post -- maybe I could process them through something like Mailbucket.
* An RSS splicer like Blogdigger groups could also do the trick, but there would have to be a bookmarklet or some other way to add (and remove) feeds from outside the site.
* I've also thought of using forum or wiki software, because they often have "watchlist" features that let users follow certain authors or threads. But I don't know if any of these watchlists offer rss feeds.
* I could use the del.icio.us inbox, but Pasta seems to have gone kaput.

Gmail for my old mail?

bonaldi — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:00:01 -0800

Gmail-like interface for my old emails? I have tons (GBs) of old emails, going back to 1992. I've pretty much got them consolidated now into mbox format and I'd like to have some sort of searchable web interface for them, much like gmails. I know Mail.app does searching, but that ties me to one machine, which is boo.

As far as the interface goes, I love gmail's searching and especially the conversation view.

Is there anything that will do what I want? At my disposal I've got an OS X server, a Sun server, and hosting space on Dreamhost.

(PS: I know about uploading scripts for gmail, but they a) get the date wrong and b) will take a very long time with this amount of email)

Favorite ways to say "hello" and "bye"

Sharcho — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 09:00:04 -0800

What are some of your favorite ways to say "hello" and "bye"? (to greet friends that you already know, I'm not looking for pick-up lines)

How do I deal with conversations I find boring?

spiderwire — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:19:36 -0800

how do i deal with conversation topics i don't care about? i've always had a huge problem feigning interest in topics that i really don't care about. it's not really that i'm lazy or quiet (although that certainly contributes to it), i'm always just kind of baffled when i have to talk to someone about a topic that i know nothing about.

how do you all deal with it when a friend gets really excited about a topic that you could honestly care less about? is there a polite way to say "please stop talking about that, i could care less"?

i suppose the possibility exists that i'm just a jerk, but i always feel really guilty when someone tells me something or draws my attention to something that they obviously find really interesting and all of a sudden i draw a blank on what to say, and just kind of stare. i feel like i'm letting them down or insulting them by not responding with enthusiasm. --and even if i manage to do that, i'm so bad at it that it invariably comes off as forced or disingenuous.

any suggestions?

Avoiding interview-style questions

Sharcho — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:18:40 -0800

When meeting new people, how do you avoid the interview-style boring questions? (How old are you? Where did you grow up? Do you work or study? ...) What techniques do you use to avoid answering these questions without appearing antisocial?
What do you do when you're out of things to say, and have the urge to ask these questions?
How do you convert the conversation to something more creative?

It's not that I have anything to hide, but I hate repeating the same conversations every time, and I don't think it's a good way of getting to know someone new.

TEFL activity ideas

hazyjane — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 05:39:48 -0800

I'm teaching English conversation to my French colleagues, and I'm looking for fun ideas to help us have enjoyable, engaging conversations. These students range from intermediate to advanced. I've looked on some TEFL forums and gotten a few ideas, but I'd like to hear your suggestions as well. During our first lesson, we played the small plane crash survival game, which went over very well. I've also thought about reading and discussing some articles, listening to some talk radio, etc. But I'd love to hear some more ideas.

Have a Nice Day!

Anonymous — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 00:22:57 -0800

I'd like to be nicer to people. I'm generally anxious, socially awkward, and don't enunciate very well. I have trouble with spontaneous conversation and small talk, and get flustered by clumsy social encounters. As a result I've developed a reputation as aloof and unapproachable. What can I do to be a more pleasant person?